Comment by chriswarbo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chriswarbo | Hacker News Reader

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At a previous employer we would only push changes to production when all regions were outside office hours, which ended up being around 3AM for us. Only a few people had access to push changes, which they did from home (run deploy script, go through a checklist of what should have changed, run revert script if there's a problem). They'd get paid for being on-call, and used an authentication app to access our systems.

One day my boss asked if I would install this authentication app on my phone, so I would be able to push changes. I refused, stating that my phone is my private property. This resulted in quite a long conversation, with reassurances about security, etc. but I didn't budge. At one point they stated that my "argument wouldn't work" if it was on a company-provided phone. I completely agreed and said that would be fine, which seemed to surprise them.

I don't think it had even occurred to them that I was being honest: I didn't want to install random things on my phone. I wasn't making up some excuse to avoid being on call in the early hours.

(Of course, I also wasn't going to suggest a way to end up on call in the early hours!)

Surprisingly enough, I see a lot of people installing whatever tools their company uses on their personal phone/smartwatch _without anybody in the company asking them to do so_. It just seems like an "obvious" thing to do for people. I've never had to argue about it with anyone as you did, but if it happened I can already see the other person asking me, surprised, why I don't have Slack on my phone and how do I keep in touch with work outside of the office.

I personally installed several of these apps because it allows me to respond to emails and messages while I'm not home (running errands, doing chores, playing hookie, etc). This, in turn, gives me much more freedom while working from home. To me, this outweighed whatever privacy issues people can come up with. Funnily enough, this has probably had the opposite of the intended effect, which is to increase productivity.

I was not talking about privacy issues but that's actually a good reason too.

It's because people don't think of these implications, and software companies are deliberately dishonest these days. People are stuck in the mindset that tech companies are benevolent with their customers best interest at heart, and are somehow different in philosophy than those cold hard brick and mortar companies that only care about a dollar. This is why Chrome market share remains so high.

They probably get an unsolicited email every 10 days, just like I do, from slackbot, asking them to install the slack desktop client to get a "better experience," because someone at work added you to the slack channel. Only they don't realize that the slack desktop app is just a second web browser dedicated to going to slack.com, that they are running while they are presumably running their first web browser. Slackbot doesn't tell you that you are wasting compute having two browsers open, just that it's 'better' somehow than running the site on the browser you already have open. It also isn't very clear that once you have slack open, all your coworkers can see you are "available" like its 2001 and you are logging into AIM.

> It's because people don't think of these implications

Even if they don't, I'd assume they would uninstall it as quick as they installed it when they start receiving notifications from colleagues during their break lunch or on the weekend. But it doesn't seem to be what the majority of people do. Not sure why people feel morally or socially obligated to keep checking what's going on at work on a 24/7 basis.

I wonder if there is a link with Twitter/Facebook/Instagram addictions.

Probably depends on the culture. My slack is pretty dead generally. However, imagine you are a new hire. You see the slack is active. You want to be seen, so you are now active on slack, and it ramps up from there. I think its less addiction, and more corporate-culture virtue signalling. "Look at how much I'm on slack 'working' and how readily I throw away my personal free time to be here on slack, please promote me."

I think slack knows a certain amount of people are like this, and have crafted the patterns in their product to maximize this behavior. That's why I get many notification emails a day that frequently leave out messages or repeat ones I've been sent already, to maximize my time checking the main client and be thinking of slack throughout the working day. Slack wants organizations to feel reliant on its services, even when it does little more in practice than email threads have done for my org at least.

Android work profiles make this so easy - it doesn't appear as easy on iOS, but I was never a big iOS user.

I don't mind using resources on my personal device, I mind the access to my personal information. Carrying two phones vs. one for isolation make sense, but if the isolation can be done in hardware/software on the same device it's much easier for me.

Work profiles are okay. They're a little buggy for my taste (e.g., I still have the wrong Play Store installed after removing my last work profile), and I think the remote IT department has a little too much control over the device (e.g., rather than being able to push an update immediately no matter how expensive the network I'm on might be -- I think it would be much more reasonable to just restrict work profile app access till after I've installed such an update at my leisure).

> why I don't have Slack on my phone and how do I keep in touch with work outside of the office.

I always ask why should I keep in touch with work during my private time. If it is really important, one could call my phone. If one does not bother to find my phone number, that means it is not urgent at all.

Hear Hear. What's worse is that corp software generally comes with corp governance and the ever so fun 'we can wipe your phone remotely in case it gets lost' policy.

No. Way.

I'll install anything my employer wants on my phone provided they've provided me with the phone :)

How did your situation work out?

Anything? What about software that continuously records everything you say and sends it to your employer?

If we're suddently ok with all kinds of intrusions, just because we got agree phone, that seems like a bad deal.

As another response says: turn off phone is an option. Leave in another room. Note: I didn't say I'd carry this phone with me 100% of the time OR keep it turned on. These are good secondary rules to discuss. (Tangent: how do I know my work computer doesn't already do this?)

If it's not your personal phone, you can just turn the work phone off when you do not want to be spied on.

> How did your situation work out?

I didn't hear anything else about it ;)

I ended up leaving after a pretty gruelling death-march (full backend replacement, with a "big bang" switchover). That switched a lot of things to .Net, which is a path I didn't want to go down in any case.

> I ended up leaving after a pretty gruelling death-march (full backend replacement, with a "big bang" switchover). That switched a lot of things to .Net, which is a path I didn't want to go down in any case.

God this made me nauseous just reading it.

If any of the "normal" apps (Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator) had a monitoring backend that my employer could use, I'd be angry with Google/Microsoft for adding that functionality rather than upset that my employer made me install it.

I don't want to carry around two devices so I'd much rather have company apps on my phone. Obviously, that is as long as the apps seem resonable, like a 2FA app. If I had to install "person location tracker by shadycorp" I'd just refuse even on a corporate phone.

But 2FA app on my personal phone vs being required to carry 2 devices? I think the first is much more appealing.

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